Live data from Hacker News

Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

ziglang.org

231–240 of 315 posts

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#231
post #201
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones. Rust's adoption is very impressive when you compare it to, say, Haskell or Clojure, but not when you compare it to languages that achieved significant and long-lasting popularity. It's roughly similar to Ada's adoption when it was of a similar age (Ada was more prevalent th…

To this day C++ has hardly won the hearts of C devs on the embedded space, on both sides of the camp there are individuals that start religious discussions about the C/C++ abreviation, there is something like Orthodox C++ that basically means using C++ compiler to write what is mostly Better C, and most frameworks that were so hyped in the 1990's are now gone, or subsyst in maintenance contracts on applications that…

Downplaying compared to what? This kind of adoption is certainly something Haskell never gained. But all those companies (or analogous ones) adopted C++ much faster. In fact, they've adopted faster virtually every language they're using seriously. So it's a great achievement compared to every language they've never adopted at all, but not such a great achievement compared to every other language they have adopted.

> that when the time gets to be rewritten it won't surely be C++.

It looks like it won't be Rust, either. I mean, some may be written in Rust, but not the majority. My point is just that as much as some erstwhile Haskell fans have taken to Rust, comparing Rust's adoption to Haskell's - a language whose joke motto was "avoid success at all costs" - is not the right metric. Given that Rust's goal was to replace C++, its success should be compared to C++ and other languages that ended up achieving similar success. I'm saying that compared to them Rust's success has been mediocre, if that, and it's not a young language anymore by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#232

I'm not a zig fan myself, but I'm glad to see a substantial project with momentum and vision moving ahead. It's not languishing. It's trying interesting new things. It's striving for incremental gains consistently over time. There's a lot of hate in these comments. Nobody is forcing you to use Zig and it's not trying to be "done" right now. And in fact, if the only thing they were focusing on was putting a bow on the…

Every once in a while I build a game engine with a tcp & udp multiplayer server to learn a new language. I started doing this with zig a couple months ago.

It might be because I've done it a few times now, and/or because of the existence of LLMs, but this is the most fun I've had doing, and the most productive I've been, and the engine absolutely rips performance wise.

Zig makes it very easy to do this kind of lowish-level data-oriented programming, and tbh, I'm hooked. I was using rust for my performance critical services but dancing around the strictness and verbosity of memory management in rust gives me nothing in comparison and just gets in my way. This is partially a skill issue, but life is short and I just want to make fast, well organized software that works.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#233
post #189

As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it. Can't we all be happy that Andrew and his team are doing their damnest to create something they believe in? Myself I am deeply inspired by their engineering spirit. In other posts I see people "worry" that Zig might not become mainstream. Why do people worry about these things? Just use the language if it helps you solve your…

This isn't a Zig-specific problem; the same thing has happened in waves for now decades on this site (see: Lisp, Ruby, Rust, etc). > You don't need to treat it like an identity. This is an eternal problem in this industry and it is by far the most annoying thing about it.

The cool thing is, when you get even a whiff of this kind of tribal fan-boy bs from someone, you can just ignore it, move on, and continue learning, building, and discussing with positive productive people who share the same motivations. Life is too short to be bickering with haters in comment sections.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#234
post #189

As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it. Can't we all be happy that Andrew and his team are doing their damnest to create something they believe in? Myself I am deeply inspired by their engineering spirit. In other posts I see people "worry" that Zig might not become mainstream. Why do people worry about these things? Just use the language if it helps you solve your…

This isn't a Zig-specific problem; the same thing has happened in waves for now decades on this site (see: Lisp, Ruby, Rust, etc). > You don't need to treat it like an identity. This is an eternal problem in this industry and it is by far the most annoying thing about it.

Is it really a problem with the industry or is this the sort of thing where discussions go on forever on message boards where no one is in charge and people aren’t trying to work together to some actual goal, but where industry doesn’t suffer from the same problems?

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#235
post #210
post #189

As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it. Can't we all be happy that Andrew and his team are doing their damnest to create something they believe in? Myself I am deeply inspired by their engineering spirit. In other posts I see people "worry" that Zig might not become mainstream. Why do people worry about these things? Just use the language if it helps you solve your…

A mainstream language has predictable library-ecosystem support for most use-cases.

A language, and by definition it's libraries, does not have to solve most use cases.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#236

Contrary to the neggies, I am positive in Zigs effort to iterate & improve. Right now there is no language that is good at io-uring. There are ok offerings, but nothing really has modern async joy that works with uring. Whoever hammers out a good solution here is going to have a massive leg up. Rust is amazing in so many ways but it has been quite a brutal road to trying to support io-uring ok, and efforts are still…

I am also positive, but when is the language going to hit a stable very LTS version that won't be touched for a long time? If you want to compete with C, you can't do so without understanding that its stability and the developers focusing on mastering its practices, design, limitations, tooling has been one of the major successes.

There are so many other options available. If that is a concern, zig is not the answer now. Rushing to "LTS" would go completely against the ethos of constant experimentation and improvement that is and has been making zig great. C is 50 years old. Maybe give it a little time...

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#237
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that Rust is quite an old language now and its adoption is still so low, So being part of 3 major OS (Windows, Android and now Linux), the big 3 cloud providers having SDKs for the language, used by so much tooling (js + python) and being part of major internet infrastructure means its “slow” adoption then wow…

Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones. Rust's adoption is very impressive when you compare it to, say, Haskell or Clojure, but not when you compare it to languages that achieved significant and long-lasting popularity. It's roughly similar to Ada's adoption when it was of a similar age (Ada was more prevalent th…

> Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones.

No, this completely overestimates how quickly languages gain prominence.

C came out in 1972 and didn't gain its current dominance until approximately the release of the ANSI C spec in 1989/1990, after 17 years.

C++ came out in 1985 and didn't become the dominant language for gamedev until the late 90s (after it had its business-language-logic niche completely eaten by Java), after 14 years or so.

Python came out in 1991 and labored as an obscure Perl alternative until the mid-late 2000s, after about 16 years (we can carbon-date the moment of its popularity by looking at when https://xkcd.com/353/ was released).

Javascript came out in 1995 and was treated as a joke and/or afterthought in the broader programming discourse until Node.js came out in 2009, after 14 years.

Rust is currently 11 years old, and it's doing quite excellently for its age.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#238

I like Zig, lots of great features that work in unison. However the worry is by the time it reaches v1 Rust will have consumed the space that C/C++ used to. I think it will be a mainstream language though and gain a lot more traction after v1. There is also the issue of will people actually code by then.

I wouldn’t worry about that. There’s plenty of software yet to be written, in many languages. If anything, Rust’s success has shown that it’s definitely possible for a new language to succeed if it offers something new. The other tailwind for Zig is that it’s easier than ever to translate an existing codebase with tests into a new language with AI.

Their own libc project is wicked. They are gradually replacing C implementations with zig and in the mean time the C implementations effortlessly link and compile in the same compilation unit as the zig code.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#239
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would quibble with all of the claims, other than easier to learn. I really see no advantage for Zig over Rust after you get past that 2 first two weeks.

Coming from Go, I'm really disappointed in Rust compiler times. I realize they're comparable to C++, and you can structure your crates to minimize compile times, but I don't care. I want instant compilation. Zig is trying to get me instant compilation and I see that as a huge advantage for Zig (even past the first 2 weeks). I'll probably stick with Rust as my "low level language" due to its safety, type system, matur…

The key with c++ is to keep coding while compiling. Otherwise..yeah you're blocked.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#240
post #212
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing in absolute numbers doesn't mean growing the market share, and even a growing market share is not necessarily sufficiently fast growth to become a safe bet. All languages that ended up becoming very popular grew their market share much faster than Rust does. Being an old language with some real market share is obviously better than being an old language with negligible market share, but being an old language…

Do you know of a good way to measure market share? I know of GitHub's and StackOverflow's surveys, but I'm not sure how well they reflect reality. There is also Redmonk. GitHub's survey did not say much about Rust I think, despite Rust projects often having lots of starring. Rust projects might have a greater ratio of stars-to-popularity than projects in other languages, though. StackOverflow's survey was much more o…

The best sources are industry studies by market research companies that collect information from companies. The best public sources, IMO, are those based on job openings (as jobs correlate more with total number of lines of code than sources based on number of repos, PRs, or questions). Some of these are about a year out-of-date:

https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/codin...

https://www.itransition.com/developers/in-demand-programming...

https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/top-developer-skills-in-2025...

Viewing these numbers through an optimistic or pessimistic lens is a matter of perspective and, of course, no one knows the future. But when you compare Rust, which is a middle-aged language now, to how languages that ended up "making it" were at the same age, the comparison is not favourable.

Post reply on HN